I Can't Believe It's Not Buddha!

He used to be just another harmful action figure. But then Steven Seagal pulled a Dalai Lama, reemerging as a Tibetan Buddhist master. (Don't ask how. It's very mysterious.) Prepare ye the way of bad karma

I will come to know it as the Omega Hug: the official embrace of the Omega Institute of Holistic Studies. The woman in the fringed halter top and wraparound skirt sees someone se knows. Walking across the wide planked veranda—long limbed as a Modigliani, her ankle bracelets of tiny silver bells tintinnabulating as she moves—she embraces her friend, eyes closed, a beatific smile on her face, her hand moving slowly and healingly up and down the other's back. The Omega hug is long and intense—it takes a full half minute to execute—but I will see it countless times over the next three days.

At the moment, there is plenty of time to hug. About 200 of us are sitting around waiting for Steven Seagal to arrive at the famed New Age retreat center. Set in Rhinebeck, New York, among the gently rolling hills of the Hudson Valley, the Omega Institute usually expends its exquisitely positive energy offering hundreds of courses and seminars, led by such reigning spiritual superstars as Deepak Chopra. Courses like "Out of Body Experiences and Dream Exploration," "The Art of Everyday Ecstasy" and "Women's Sacred Summer Camp." But this Memorial Day weekend the seminar is title "Cultivating Compassion & Clarity," and the teacher is none other than Seagal—movie star, aikido master and, lately, teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.

According to the Omega minivan driver who picked me up at the train station, a Santa type who lives six months of the year in a nudist colony in Florida, this weekend's seminar is quite an occasion, second only to the one led by Thay Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk and author who attracts seven hundred attendees. There is some concern that it is Seagal's reputation as a aikido master, as opposed to his fame as a movie star, that will bring out the crazies. "You know," says the driver, "guys who want to be able to say they mixed it up with Steven Seagal."

I've paid roughly $700 for the three-day seminar, including meals and lodging in cabin. Scrappier types—those who choose to doss down in Omega's Spartan pup tents—are paying less. As we all wait for Seagal's arrival, the head of programming for the institute welcomes us. He is impressed with the number of men who've shown up (generally, the seminars are largely female.) He advises us that "the customary greeting for a teacher is a slight bow with the hands clasped. And it would be perfectly appropriate to address him as Rinpoche. It means 'esteemed sir' in Tibetan—literally, 'precious jewel.'"

Precious Jewel eventually does arrive, some forty-five minutes late—what turns out to be Seagal standard time. He is a large man now, with a bit of a late-model-Brando girth about him. His narrow eyes, sleek ponytail and variation on traditional Tibetan attire—an aubergine skirt and a saffron yellow satin jacket—lend him the air of a Mongol potentate. He shambles in slowly, displaying a kind of bewilderment, as if this temporal world were too jarring and suffused with craving and pain for him to absorb just yet.

He begins with asking us three questions. "How many of you have some experience with Buddhism?" Easily half the audience has none. He will have to adjust his dharma talks, the Buddhist teachings of the Way, accordingly. "How many half of us have none. And finally he asks, "Did the infamous J.J. ever show up?" A blond wearing a wrap skirt and a Lycra tank top raises her hand. "Ah, there you are. I see you, girl," he says.

If we are a monolithic group, it is only in that we are overwhelmingly white. There are some archetypal New Age Stevie Nicks types decked out in southwestern pot-smoker chic—turquoise jewelry, dangling earrings, flower skirts and scarves—who all seem to know one another. ("Didn't we meet on the Inner Voyage Cruise to Cozumel?" one woman murmurs to another.) There's also a healthy contingent of aikido/Seagal devotees from a martial-arts studio on Long Island—to a man displaying the thick-necked, wide-ass bulk of the fraternity brother. The rest of the group, including me, seem to be unwitting members of the American Gap-oisie. We are eastern-seaboard types, vaguely disgruntled seekers who, if not of actual Buddhist leanings, are at least conversant with the rudiments of the Eight Fold Path. We've been lactose intolerant in our lives; we do yoga.

Of course, there are a few people among us who have come solely to see the movie star, like the older man who knows nothing about Buddhism and whose questions to Seagal are generally along the lines of "How many meals do you eat a day?" and "Anyone ever tell you, you look like a cross between Robert Taylor and Ray Milland?"

Seagal hasn't had a big movie in years; his last film, The Patriot, never made it to American theaters (it was shown abroad). He explains to us that his absence from the screen is but an inevitable consequence of his emergence as a Holy Man. "The studios know exactly what they want. Fighting. As I became a lama, I had to establish a line I could not cross, and I've taken two years off as a result."

The Tibet thing is fairly new in Segal's repertoire of identities. All I had known or read about him prior to his weekend had located him in a different, albeit now less fashionable, part of Asia—Japan. Aikido is a Japanese martial art, and in the crypto-autobiographical opening sequence of his first film, Above the Law, Seagal is seen teaching an aikido class in Japan, speaking beautiful Japanese. In countless subsequent articles about him, including one in this magazine, Seagla has spoken exhaustively, if a tad mysteriously, about the many years he spent over there. So the new and precariously trendy embrace of Tibet comes as something of a surprise. According to the Omega catalog, Seagal, a.k.a. Terton Rinpoche, has been formally recognized as a tulku (incarnate lama from a past life) by H.H. lama Penor Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. There is perplexity among some American activists devoted to the Tibetan cause as to how Seagal earned the title so effortlessly. "I haven't looked into this, but I'm curious as to under what condition or terms he was accorded this status," says Gander Thurman, director of special projects at Tibet House in New York. "I'm afraid it troubles me." Thurman pauses, then adds, "I always wondered at the action heroes he played. He always seems to be the only one who tortures his enemies."